A brand is more influential than we might think, even in advised sales. Rob Quayle explains.
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A very competitive, but much less known firm would only win the business if they were the cheapest. It should be stressed at this point that a sale means that the person had decided to buy this product and it does not mean that they had been accepted and placed on risk.
When we drill down into the data, we are able to show that, for three of the leading brands, Company A is chosen 17% of the time when it is not cheapest and on average consumers were happy to pay on average 6% more.
Brands B & C were chosen on average 6% and 7% of the time when they were not the cheapest and consumers were happy to pay over 5% more.
Across all companies, 16% of consumers chose the second cheapest company which on average was 5% more expensive; 5% chose 3rd cheapest company which was on average 6% more expensive; and 2% were happy to opt for the 3rd cheapest company which was 9% more expensive.
The importance of advice
From an adviser’s perspective, the above is interesting, but being an intermediated sale, advisers will point out quite rightly that the importance of advice overrides the impact of brand appeal.
The adviser is there not only to bring protection to their customer’s attention and to identify the various needs, but then to recommend the right product from the right provider – working out what factors are really important and which brands live up to the expectation.
But an initial sale is only part of the protection issue; equally important is whether the person actually gets put on risk. So no matter how good the recommendation, it’s of no value to the adviser if the client doesn’t follow through or the provider doesn’t offer acceptable terms.
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